Friday, June 29, 2007

A divided Supreme Court yesterday restricted the ability of public school districts to use race to determine which schools students can attend, a decision that could sharply limit integration programs across the nation.The nine justices split decisively along ideological grounds, with a five-justice majority ruling that school admission programs in Seattle and Louisville violated the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection to individuals. Educators said the decision may lead many districts to drop efforts at racially balancing schools.In a dramatic 45 minutes on the final day of the court's term, three justices took turns reading sometimes-biting opinions that portrayed the ruling as either the natural affirmation or a bitter betrayal of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision of 1954."Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin," Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a plurality that included Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. "The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again -- even for very different reasons."He added: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

NEWPORT, R.I., June 28 -- He looked uncharacteristically dejected as he approached the lectern, fiddling with papers as he talked and avoiding the sort of winking eye contact he often makes with reporters. And then President Bush did something he almost never does: He admitted defeat."A lot of us worked hard to see if we couldn't find a common ground," he said an hour after his immigration plan died on Capitol Hill. "It didn't work."[. . .]"Sand is flowing out of the hourglass," said Fred I. Greenstein, a Princeton University scholar on the presidency, who was struck by the gloomy tone of Bush's televised statement. "He looked much less like the kid on the cover of Mad magazine without a care. . . . He looked very angry and almost having difficulty getting the sentences out. That seems to me to contrast with some of the early stages" of his presidency.

As I have said before President Bush is a man who when he gets an idea in his head believes it tenaciously, even when all logic and fact indicate that it is not true. And whatever else you can say about him he is a man of immense personal integrity in that when he believes himself to be in the right he will move ahead regardless of any cost. These facts have to be putting Mr. Bush in a very bad mood now, however I believe that we, the people of the United States have just given the president the greatest gift which he could have possibly received in these closing months of his presidency.

We have given him a legacy of which he can be proud and for which history will not curse him.

Had the amnesty bill passed the Senate and House and been delivered to him he would surely have signed it into law. Upon doing so he would have felt intensely proud of himself and believed that no matter how unpopular the measure was at the present that in time it would be seen as the greatest act of compassionate statesmanship since Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

What would have happened instead is that the already immense drain on the economy imposed by the anywhere from 12 to 30 million illegal aliens would have increased exponentially as the newly legalized residents began bringing in their families and all of them began signing up for social services. The downward pressure on US wages would have increased as even more low wage workers flooded into the labor market and as the aliens began to gain citizenship the nation's political culture would have rapidly began to change.

Gone would have been the fairly even left/right split which characterizes the electorate today. A split which prevents either party from fully enacting its agenda (bad, in that it prevents Social Security privatization, medical savings accounts and the Fair Tax - good, in that it prevents socialized health care, surrender in Iraq and the complete repeal of the First and Second Amendments). Newly minted Mexican-American citizens would have flocked to the party of the Left which would have offered both them and the nation of Mexico (to whom their true loyalty would have continued to belong) the most in domestic socialist giveaways and the most in foreign aid giveaways.

As the United States began its inevitable slide first into European-style socialism and then into Latin American-style chaos the blame would have fallen not on John McCain and The Killer of Mary Jo Kopechne and Harry Reid and Lindsay Graham it would have fallen squarely on George W Bush as the prime mover and chief instigator of America's downfall.

However as things stand now George W Bush's most lasting achievement in office will be the way in which he avoided the enormous errors of both his father and Ronald Reagan in appointing wretchedly bad justices to the Supreme Court and managed to change the culture of the Court in a way which is real, significant, lasting and highly positive.

Even the Harriet Meiers disaster was born out of a desire to avoid the mistakes of previous Republican presidents by appointing someone who was personally known to the President and in whom he felt he could place absolute trust to not "grow in office" (translation: turn sharply to the left).

If George W Bush had succeeded in his efforts to grant amnesty to the alien criminals among us and effectively erase the border between the US and Mexico he would have gone down in history as the man who destroyed the United States of America. Now he will be remembered as the man who restored constitutional sanity to an out-of-control Supreme Court whose judicial activism was threatening to undermine the nation's respect for the rule of law and strip the federal government of its legitimacy.

I know that Mr. Bush will not see things this way now. In fact he will probably never see things this way. In the world which he inhabits (major portions of which exist only in his own head) he will see this as a stinging defeat and as a severe blow to the nation and he will go on believing this long after logic and fact indicate that it is not true. But whatever George W Bush thinks of us, the American people, right now the fact remains that we just guaranteed that his name won't be remembered alongside Jack Murtha, Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot.

Not bad for a bunch of snaggletooth hillbilly retards drinking moonshine out of mason jars in our tarpaper shacks and singlewides out on the edge of the city dump.